ABSTRACT
Early in February 1380, Bernat Martí’s lembus sailed into Mallorca’s harbor, the Porto Pi. Among the cargo was Gordino, described in the notarial record as a “Sardinian bastard slave child, about three years old.” 1 The boy was not prized merchandise—Martí gave him outright to the fuller Jaume Jaubert. Typical of arid notarial style, nothing more is revealed of Gordino than a single mention of an otherwise obscure life, a circumstance in which we can find him on a particular day and time. The purpose of this study is to present a selection of these cases, moments in the lives of more than 600 enslaved people recorded in Mallorcan notarial protocols between 1360 and 1390. The evidence suggests a wide range of conditions under which the enslaved labored and lived, and disparities in the economic and legal resources at their disposal. The confessional status of the enslaved played a role in their treatment, and enslaved Roman Catholic Sardinian prisoners of war and Greek Orthodox Christian slaves seem to have had better opportunities for manumission and integration into the lower rungs of Mallorcan society. The treatment of the enslaved was also conditioned by the rising cost of labor throughout the period, caused by epidemiological crises and political, military, and financial challenges faced by Mallorca as a frontier outpost of the Crown of Aragon. The fates of individual slaves were bound in a matrix of local and regional politics, cultural assumptions, civic hygiene efforts, and family affairs. By examining Mallorcan slavery through the notarial lens, I will argue that slave identities were formed, and reformed, in the context of the daily personal and commercial decision-making of slave owners, freed slaves, and occasionally those still in slavery.
